[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 1:21 AM Eastern on 8 Nov. See below.]

If this production doesn't drive us back to live opera nothing will.

Now, where to get the $$$...

Update (1:21 AM Eastern on 8 Nov): On reading several eMails referring to our above entry, we now see we've managed to be unintentionally ambiguous concerning our two one-line comments, so let us now correct the problem.

When we wrote, "If this production doesn't drive us back to live opera nothing will," we meant to say, "If this production doesn't drive us back to live opera TO SEE THIS PRODUCTION, nothing will," meaning that the intriguing staging was so complex we knew that no filmed reproduction of that staging (as in a DVD or via the Met's HD Live) could capture it fully or even accurately and therefore it had to be experienced live in the theater to properly assess its appropriateness as a staging for this opera about which appropriateness we have some fundamental doubts; doubts that would NOT have arisen had Lulu been a stage play rather than an opera.

As to our closing line, we were NOT coyly soliciting donations. Merely jestingly stating an actual impediment as living like a virtual hermit for the past 30 years or so, we're sorely ill-equipped materials-wise to venture out into the high-class, high-cost world of NYC opera-going without expending substantial amounts of money to properly equip ourself.

We trust this update will serve to remove all ambiguity from our above entry.

We just got around to viewing this lovely movie (thank you, Amazon Instant Video) and it's a thorough delight. Set in a fictional English retirement home for musicians called Beecham House (modeled on the famous Casa di Riposo per Musicisti in Milan founded by Verdi) it stars Maggie Smith, Tom Courtenay, Pauline Collins, and Billy Connolly (an actor with whose name and work we're totally unfamiliar but who is so much the spitting image of John Cleese in face, figure, and voice that it was not until the movie's closing credits we learned it was not John Cleese playing the role) all of whom turned in touching performances in this touching little tale which film critic Stanley Kauffmann described in his review for The New Republic as being "a bit thin" (which it is) but then went on to astutely observe that it really "doesn't matter. The important thing was to spend a hundred minutes or so [i.e., the length of the movie] with these people in that place," which people also included a singing cameo role for the great dramatic soprano Dame Gwyneth Jones who played Anne Langley, one of the resident guests of Beecham House. Lots of fine music-making to be heard throughout the movie all of the instrumentalists involved being real-life retired instrumentalists playing resident guests of Beecham House who actually performed the instrumental music seen in the movie themselves.

If you haven't seen this movie it's well worth at least renting from Amazon Instant Video for three bucks (we bought the film from AIV for eight bucks) and some 100 minutes of your time.

Alex Ross, classical music critic for The New Yorker, notes on his blog The Rest Is Noise:

Russell Thomas, speaking to Anne Midgette [here]: "The conversation about blackface is a distraction. It’s not about whether or not Mr. Antonenko was painted dark. It’s also not about whether whites should be allowed to sing Porgy and Bess. It’s about this: Why aren’t the stages representative of the communities in which they are located?"

Answer: Because it's unimportant, no pressing matter, and "a distraction". What matters on theater stages, the ONLY thing that matters — whether what's being presented is straight drama, musical comedy, opera, or what have you — is the excellence of the presentation and performance of the artwork being staged. Period. Full stop. Everything else — everything — is but of ancillary importance and only a hypersensitive, corrupted postmodern sensibility would argue otherwise.

In yesterday's New York Times there appeared an article titled "Debating 'Otello,' Blackface and Casting Trends" wherein Ben Brantley, the Times's theater critic, and Anthony Tommasini, the Times's classical music critic, discussed (via eMail exchanges between the two) the Met's new, no-dark-skin-makeup-for-the-Caucasian-Otello staging of Verdi's Otello. Instead of a trenchant discussion of the very real dramatic problems presented by such a staging (which problems we discussed here), these two New York Times critics engaged in a near-worthless, mealymouthed back-and-forth that even the PC-friendly Times ought to have been embarrassed to publish. We especially liked this unintentionally revealing bit of idiocy from Mr. Brantley:

Seeing "Otello," I tried to imagine how I would have responded if I hadn’t known the story before. Would I have felt something was missing without the makeup? And no, I don’t suppose I would have.

What I did miss, in the production’s first half, was any sense of what set Otello apart. Aleksandrs Antonenko, in the role, tended to blend into the crowd in the early scenes. Even a red scarf, anything, to set him apart might have helped relieve that black-and-gray canvas, and something to indicate that he had come from a culture different from the one he now inhabits.

How about markedly darkened skin (but not grotesquely darkened as in "blackface") that would instantly have shown Otello to be "from a culture different from the one he now inhabits" — you know, just as Shakespeare intended? You think that might have done the trick?

Of course it would have, you mealymouthed twit. It's not for nothing, you know, that Shakespeare didn't title his play merely Othello but Othello, the Moor of Venice.

(Since the inception of S&F in 2004 the subject of Regietheater and Regietheater Wagner in particular has been something of an idée fixe here. It's now become a tired subject, per se, here as elsewhere, as it's been pretty much all talked out; here, over the years, by us and elsewhere by others and there's not much more we have to say about it, per se (as opposed to talking about it within the context of making general critical comment in future on individual productions), and so this summing up. We intend it to be our last per se commentary on the subject.)

* * *

What damage, if any, would be done to world culture were it the case that in no competent public venue (competent meaning they've the wherewithal, talent, and facilities to do the job properly) could the plays of Shakespeare be seen presented fully true to the way Shakespeare set them down using his own settings and plots and in his own language (Werktreue presentations to use the handy German term which translates literally as "work-true" meaning "faithful to the original")? Appalling damage would be the informed consensus; damage so appalling as to be virtually unthinkable.

That question and its probable response intruded itself as we followed via the Web, including a viewing of the full-length HD video of this year's new production of Tristan und Isolde, the 2015 Bayreuth Festival (Bayreuther Festspiele) the annual Richard Wagner music festival held each summer from July through August in Bayreuth, Germany which ended its 2015 Festival year Friday of last week (28 August). The Festival is the world's oldest and most venerable music festival extant founded in 1876 by opera's Shakespeare, Richard Wagner — a towering, transcendent genius who today still bestrides the domain of opera like a colossus and whose music-dramas have since shaped or influenced the course not only of opera but of all Western music, as we've previously put it, not to even speak of his influence in and on the literary world and in and on the worlds of virtually all the arts worldwide.

The Festival was founded initially, as most informed operagoers are aware, for the express purpose of presenting Werktreue performances of Wagner's tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen in a theater specially built by Wagner for the purpose. Subsequently, other of Wagner's stageworks were added to Bayreuth's Werktreue repertoire (three operas — Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin — and three music-dramas — Tristan und Isolde, Die Meistersinger, and Parsifal; that last a music-drama written expressly to be performed at Bayreuth and at Bayreuth alone which music-drama premiered there in 1882) by Wagner himself (Parsifal) and, after his death in 1883, by his wife and most intimate confidant Cosima in accordance with her understanding of Wagner's wishes. Wagner intended these Werktreue presentations to serve as models for presentations of his stageworks worldwide which in fact they did and, in some measure, continue to do even today the problem being that, in a betrayal of the Festival's very raison d'être, those presentations are today and for decades before have been anything but Werktreue.

Before going on with this, let us first understand clearly what Werktreue means and entails in terms of opera staging.

Foremost and above all, it does NOT mean or entail devotion to a work's original staging or to any past staging tradition at all. What it does mean and entail is an assiduous and unremitting devotion to the full sense and spirit of the original creator's intent as made manifest in the work's score (music, text, and stage directions).

A paradigmatic example of this is the genuinely revolutionary 1951-58 staging at Bayreuth of Der Ring des Nibelungen by Wagner grandson Wieland Wagner which staging (to which we are a 1958 eyewitness to Die Walküre) radically broke with all prior stagings of the tetralogy.

With Wieland taking his (unacknowledged) cue from the groundbreaking work of Swiss stage designer Adolphe Appia (1862-1928), the production's almost total absence of stage furniture, its use of non-period-or-place-committal costumes and settings, and the creative use of lighting to model and shape space and the characters who inhabit it, Wieland — taking his grandfather at his word when in 1853 he declared that the yet unwritten music of the Ring "shall sound in a way that people shall hear what they cannot see" — created a neutral "frame" or "matrix" for the tetralogy, so to speak, that permitted the music itself, working in tandem with the text and the audience's own imagination, to fill in all the missing stage furniture as if it all were right in front of the audience's eyes. It was a masterstroke, a stroke of genius even, as it made manifest to the audience in the most intimate, Werktreue way imaginable Richard Wagner's deepest interior vision of the Ring while rendering Wieland's properly transparent.

We trust all the above will clarify the matter of Werktreue in terms of opera staging and forestall as well the typical straw-man and red-herring charges leveled by some against such as we that would accuse us of being "reactionary" and/or "traditionalist".

But back to our present Bayreuth discussion...

Beginning some 43 years ago something went horribly wrong at Bayreuth, the one place in the world where Werktreue Wagner ought to be guaranteed to be heard and seen as a matter of course and of principle. A malignancy began growing there which in the past ten or so years has developed into a Stage IV terminal case, all of it done under the stewardship and control of direct descendants of Richard Wagner himself, from his grandson Wolfgang who, as sole director of the Festival since the untimely and devastating death of his older brother Wieland in 1966 at age 49, began hiring outside director/producers to stage Wagner's stageworks at the Festival never mind they had no experience directing or producing Wagnerian opera or music-drama or, in some cases, no experience directing or producing any opera at all much less any of Wagner's stageworks, to Richard's great-granddaughters (Wolfgang's daughters) Katharina and Eva Wagner-Pasquier who, subsequent to Wolfgang's retirement in 2008 (Wolfgang died in 2010), were appointed co-directors of the Festival (Wagner-Pasquier resigned her position as of the end of this year's Festival). And that malignancy has a name. It's called Regietheater.

Regietheater, as pretty much all opera-lovers know by now, is a German term that translates as "director's theater" which when applied in the world of opera refers to the director/producer (or Regie) of the stage presentation of the opera being performed wherein in place of the vision and intent of the opera's creator as made manifest in the score is substituted the vision and intent of the Regie which — unlike Wieland Wagner's brilliant 1951-58 Bayreuth staging of the Ring, the world's first full-on Werktreue Regietheater staging of a Wagner stagework* — typically has little or only remote and tenuous bearing upon or connection with the vision and intent of the opera's creator. It is, in fact, a point of pride for Regies that their productions be such claiming it's their unique "interpretation" of the opera creator's vision and intent to make it more "relevant" (Lord! What an overused and contemptible word when used in this context) to our contemporary times or some other rationalization or justification along those lines; a rationalization and justification bought wholesale and eagerly by the jaded among longtime operagoers who are forever on the lookout for something — anything — operatically novel and unfamiliar in order to stimulate their jaded opera palates. Such stagings are only rarely an interpretation of the work to hand. More often, overwhelmingly more often, it's the Regie's postmodern commentary (called, a Konzept) on the opera creator's vision and intent, either directly or as reflective of modern-day matters cultural/social/political, not the Regie's interpretation of it, and that, coupled with the ubiquitous fraudulent practice — fraudulent to the point that in any just society it would be actionable at law — of promoting and billing the non-Werktreue reconceived opera as the original creator's opera of the same name which it never is, is precisely what makes typical non-Werktreue Regietheater opera the pernicious thing it is: a work by a Regie who's forgotten or never learned that an opera Regie's job — his sole job — is to realize onstage, in the most vivid and compelling manner possible, the opera creator's concept and vision of the opera as made manifest in the score and that anything beyond or other than that and the opera Regie is operating in territory in which he has no business being much less messing about with.

(It should be noted here that the aforementioned Regie rationalization or justification of their (mostly) non-Werktreue Regietheater stagings, empty though it may be, is one offered by the less self-important, less self-involved Regies. Then there are those breathtakingly and perversely self-important, self-involved Regies such as the late Christoph Schlingensief, whose notorious so-called "disintegrating bunny" Parsifal of 2004 for Bayreuth is among the Festival's most outrageous non-Werktreue Regietheater stagings, who averred that with his staging he intended to "reconcil[e] Nietzsche with Wagner by negating Wagner's silly Buddhist dream", and such as Frank Castorf, the Regie responsible for the current outrageous non-Werktreue Regietheater Bayreuth Ring, who was incensed on being told he would not be permitted to rework Wagner's music and text in order to accommodate his postmodern, Brechtian, socio-political agitprop. It should also be noted here that coming up with a new so-called Konzept to define and shape a Regietheater opera staging as did the two above named Regies is a piece of cake, creatively speaking, as opposed to coming up with a new and resonant Werktreue Regietheater opera staging fully faithful in sense and spirit to the opera creator's original "Konzept" as made manifest in the opera's score. Any hack can do the former. It takes a Regie of uncommon creative gift to accomplish the latter. Unhappily, as Regies go, the former are legion, the latter almost as rare as unicorns.)

We've had occasion to say something about this [new 2015] production in a prior S&F entry based on a live audio stream of the premiere by BR Klassik Radio as well as on act-by-act production photos and verbal descriptions of the physical action so this new HD video [of the entire production] held no surprises for us as far as the staging is concerned.

We previously called that staging sophomoric and sophomoric is what it proved to be, from the conceit of Act I's blatant if only tenuously symbolically apposite allusion to M.C. Escher's impossible staircases leading nowhere, to the bizarre sci-fi futuristic prison of Act II (yes, this is a Regietheater staging — what else? — and Act II is set in a prison run by the henchmen of this production's tyrannical König Marke wherein Tristan and Isolde are held captive along with Kurwenal), to the imagined symbolic rightness of Act III's utterly black, all but featureless blank stage and background with its reappearing, floating, Isolde-filled triangles of light (perhaps a reference, if reference they indeed are, to the tent-like structure Tristan and Isolde jerry-rigged in the prison of Act II to hide them from the searchlights of König Marke's henchmen, but given Katharina's sophomoric Regie mentality we shudder to think what else those triangles might be a reference to), not to again speak of the imbecile close of the music-drama in this staging wherein Isolde, at the close of her Verklärung, is ripped away from Tristan's corpse and dragged off by König Marke very much alive as if she were mere chattel (as indeed she was originally intended to be). Finally, after having seen the full production, to all the above we now feel compelled to add how appalling the disconnect is, emotional and intellectual, between this staging and the nonpareil transcendent work created by Katharina's great-grandfather more than 150 years ago in what proved to be an ironic attempt to compose an opera that could be mounted quickly and easily even by theaters of modest means. We do, however, have to give Katharina credit for cleverly and neatly doing away with the magic love potion thing upon the magic of which potion even those who ought to know better are still wont to lay blame for the lovers' out-of-control passion for each other.

If you think this all quite horrid we assure you the actual witnessing of this Regietheater staging is a full order of magnitude more painful than is the reading about it.

Currently, following Bayreuth's lead, Regietheater Wagner can be seen on the stage of almost every major opera house worldwide, New York's Metropolitan Opera, arguably the world's most important opera house, included,** which opera houses are the only established opera venues with the wherewithal, talent, and facilities to stage Wagner's stageworks properly.

And so, to restate the opening question, What damage, if any, would be done to world culture were it the case that in no competent public venue could the stageworks of Richard Wagner be seen presented true to the way Wagner set them down with their hallmark, artform-defining organic unity of music, text, and stage picture that's the unique and special genius of Wagner's art?

For an informed some, ourself included, the answer is manifestly clear: appalling damage; damage so appalling as to be virtually unthinkable. Curiously and inexplicably, the jury of the opera world is still out on the question even after some 43 years of accumulated hard evidence arguing against Regietheater Wagner as Werktreue Wagner and so the unthinkable threatens perennially to become appalling, permanent reality worldwide.

This may seem a thing of concern only for dedicated Wagnerians who are but a small minority of audiences for opera. But a moment's reflection will reveal just how tragically myopic is such a view. For absent the existence of genuine Werktreue presentations of Wagner's stageworks, opera audiences, existing and new, will be denied the essential fundamental references necessary to understand and assess the value and worth of those stageworks as well as the value and worth of their creator and the impact of both on the shaping and development of the artform, not to even speak of being denied the sheer, soul-enriching pleasure of experiencing the full sense and spirit of the stageworks themselves as their creator imagined them experienced.

Appalling damage indeed and no small matter as we're certain most, if not all, will agree.

_____________________________

* Before Wieland there had been scattered non-Bayreuth-traditional productions of Wagner's stageworks — most notably the Mahler-Roller Vienna Tristan of 1903 which is marked by some as the birth of Regietheater in opera, and the Klemperer-Dülberg Krolloper (Berlin) Holländer of 1929 — but their influence was limited and taken studied notice of mostly within theater's and opera's professional circles.

** The Met abstained from Regietheater Wagner for its new (2012) production of Wagner's epic tetralogy Der Ring des Nibelungen — the presentation of which work is always the major event of any opera season for any opera house — only by atrocious misadventure. Met general manager Peter Gelb made the colossal blunder of imagining he could eat his cake and have it too by mounting director/producer Robert Lepage's new, elaborate, obscenely expensive but non-Regietheater mechanized and digital Las Vegas dinner-theater-style production of Wagner's great tetralogy as it would, so imagined Mr. Gelb, satisfy both "progressive" and "traditionalist" audiences alike. Predictably, and in large measure, the production satisfied neither and drew (justified) contempt from both.

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 12:54 AM Eastern on 25 Sep. See below.]

In 2014 Peter Gelb, General Manager of New York City's world-important Metropolitan Opera, decided to stage The Death of Klinghoffer, a fairly infrequently performed 1991 opera by the famous contemporary American composer John Adams, and immediately a storm of protest erupted as the work was perceived by a number of people to be markedly anti-Israel and anti-Semitic. In order to appease these objectors Mr. Gelb decided to pander to their sensibilities by withholding the opera from presentation in the Met's hugely popular "Live in HD" series, movie house and TV, as well as in a planned audio broadcast of the opera on the, um, questionable grounds that such presentations "might be used to fan global anti-Semitism" and that such presentations "would be inappropriate at this time of rising anti-Semitism, particularly in Europe".

And so, once again, the Met panders to the sensibilities of simpletons and PC automatons, this time by obliterating the central underlying dramatic and tragic linchpin of this great opera (and the great play upon which it's based) — the hero's blackness (or "Moorishness"), the signifying outer expression of his otherness, an otherness that underlies and drives his every action and reaction in the drama — absent which the drama is robbed of its essential underlying tragic element (after all, Shakespeare did not title his play Othello but Othello, the Moor of Venice) and is thereby emasculated both as drama and as tragedy.

Way t'go!, Mr. Gelb. You're truly a man of your time.

O tempora! O mores!

Update (12:54 AM Eastern on 25 Sep): Subsequent to the premiere of the above referred to new Met production of Otello (21 September 2015) a discussion took place on the Opera-L opera forum (eMail list) on same to which discussion we contributed and which contribution we below reprint strictly for the purpose of making an S&F record of it as is our usual practice.

In Anne Midgette's review of the Met's _Otello_ for _The Washington Post_, she writes:

=== Begin Quote ===
Before the opening, the Met announced it was dispensing with the usual dark makeup, a wise decision because it didn’t affect the drama a bit....
=== End Quote ===

I, of course, didn't see the production but if what Ms. Midgette wrote is really true, there's something terribly — fundamentally — wrong dramatically with this production. With an un-made-up Caucasian Otello it's not possible theatrically to establish and maintain what is absolutely essential — absolutely central — to this tragic drama: Otello's "otherness" as I put it some two months ago [i.e., in our above S&F entry] as outwardly signified by his blackness (or "Moorishness"). Absent that outward constant signifier of Otello's otherness, which otherness "drives his every action and reaction in the drama", we're left with nothing more than a half-demented, murderously jealous brute blindly acting out his mad rage.

Hardly a tragic hero.

ACD

———————————————

Dennis ______ wrote:

>Otello's blackness is the essence of his standing as a Romantic hero.
>That blackness is vital to the character and all that stems from it to
>form the action of the opera. It may be subtly suggested, or it may be
>overtly shown; but it needs to BE THERE. It simply cannot be ignored:
>forcing Otello's "blackness" to be a product, merely, of the opera
>goer's imagination is a totally modern approach. It's a perfectly valid
>approach in SOME works, as Paul _______ notes in his post; but it is
>one totally inappropriate to an opera steeped in Romantic tradition.

Good points all. I would only further suggest that anyone who imagines Otello's visible blackness (or "Moorishness") is anything other than essential — central — to both the character and the opera should ask himself why Shakespeare made his wholly fictional Othello, from which character Boito's Otello is taken as is, of course, Boito's libretto taken from Shakespeare's play, a black (a Moor).

Does anyone seriously imagine Shakespeare did that willy-nilly just for the hell of it or, just as bad, to be true to his fictional source (a story titled "Un Capitano Moro" by Italian novelist Giovanni Battista Giraldi ("Cinthio"))? The very idea is, of course, thoroughly preposterous. Shakespeare made his Othello a black (a Moor) in an all-white society because Shakespeare saw in the device powerful and tragic dramatic possibilities and a perfect outer signifier of his character's otherness — an otherness that underlies and drives his Othello's (and Boito's Otello's) "every action and reaction in the drama", as I've previously put it, which is to say it's absolutely central to the character and to the drama both in Shakespeare's play and Boito's libretto and MUST be shown *explicitly*.

In one way or another I've been involved with music (mostly but not entirely of the sort that's referred to as "classical music") since my earliest remembered childhood and, as is common with such as us, have over the course of many years (I passed through my biblically allotted threescore-and-ten some time ago) arrived, pretty much spontaneously and entirely informally and absent any sort of agenda, at my own personal ranking of composers throughout history which ranking, ultimately, must be considered helpless of any wholly objective, wholly rational, wholly quantifiable justification. That notwithstanding, I, as is also common with such as us, maintain that ranking as if it were as objectively, rationally, and quantifiably justifiable as are the laws of, say, Newtonian physics.

My ranking is made up of four hierarchical classes of composers according to native endowment the separation between each successive hierarchal class consisting not of a line but of a chasm; an eternally unbridgeable chasm; a chasm that can never be crossed by the efforts of members of a class: the genuine craftsman, the genuinely gifted, the genuine genius, and the transcendent genius. Which composers I assigned to each class has varied over the years for all classes save one, the ultimate class: the transcendent genius. The composers I assigned to that class have never changed since the inception of the ranking and they number but three: Bach, Mozart, and Wagner (I at times considered assigning a fourth, Beethoven, on the strength of his last quartets but always in the end decided that was insufficient qualification over his lifetime of work).

I know I'm hardly alone in this sort of spontaneous personal ranking and wondered how others go about it. Feel free to express your thoughts on the matter below for which purpose I open the Comments Section on this entry.

The first half of the program was devoted to works by Wagner and opened with the Tannhäuser Overture (Dresden version).

"The whole duty of a conductor," wrote Wagner, "is comprised in his ability always to indicate the right TEMPO [Wagner's emphasis]. His choice of tempi will show whether he understands the piece or not."

Absolutely true (and Wagner would know better than anyone as in addition to being an opera composer of transcendent genius he was also recognized and acknowledged in his time as a first-rate conductor and not merely of his own music) and by that standard Maestro Nelsons evidenced no understanding of the Tannhäuser Overture whatsoever.

Where did he go wrong? We can do no better by way of explanation than to quote our own good self from a 2004 S&F piece titled "A Question Of Rhetoric":

In the [Tannhäuser] overture's opening episode, the chorale (called the "Pilgrim's Chorus") represents merely the weary progress of Christian pilgrims, first toward, then away from an imagined physical point; i.e., a pretty much matter-of-fact affair. In the closing episode of the overture when the chorale reappears with a ff return to triple measure in the trombones rising above, against, and in opposition to the furious, frenetic, and insistent ff rapid runs of duple measure 16ths in the strings (representing the dithyrambic claims of the Venusberg), it's not merely a recap of the chorale of the overture's opening episode but its apotheosis, a declaration of the triumph and redeeming power of self-sacrificing love over the selfish, ensnaring claims of the flesh promoted within the Venusberg.

In all the readings of this overture we've heard to date [now including the present reading by Maestro Nelsons], the chorale's appearance in the overture's opening episode is taken almost as broad, slow, and triumphant (in the trombones) as its reappearance in the overture's closing episode, which is, of course, rhetorically absurd, both musically and dramatically, and, further, serves to blunt that closing episode leaving it nowhere to go dramatically except into the dumper. The Venusberg episodes (the overture's center episodes) are then taken too slow as well, both as a matter of proportion (to the too-slow opening chorale), and also as a misguided attempt at the sensuous rather than the dithyrambic for the Venusberg center as a whole, which is also wrong rhetorically, both musically and dramatically.

So much for Maestro Nelsons's reading of the concert's opening work.

Next came the aria "In fernem Land" from Act III of Lohengrin with Mr. Kaufmann as soloist who here turned in his typically superlative performance both musically and dramatically and by so doing all but forced Maestro Nelsons to get his reading right as well. Closing the concert's first half was the famous (and famously misnamed) "Prelude and Liebestod" stitched together from Wagner's great(est) masterpiece Tristan Und Isolde with, of course, Ms. Opolais as soloist who here acquitted herself competently and most bravely as did Maestro Nelsons.

The concert then undertook an abrupt descent from the sublime to the soapy and we were treated so some Italian opera goodies which delighted the audience no end and with which Maestro Nelsons seemed more at home. We were given, one after another, "Mamma, quel vino è generoso" from Act II of Cavalleria rusticana (Mr. Kaufmann); "Un bel di" from Act II of Madama Butterfly (Ms. Opolais); the "Intermezzo" from Cavalleria rusticana (the BSO); "Tu, tu, amore?" the love duet from Act II of Manon Lescaut (Ms. Opolais and Mr. Kaufmann); and "O soave fanciulla" the Finale from Act 1 of La Bohème (Ms. Opolais and Mr. Kaufmann). As we've only passing familiarity with all these works as with Italian opera generally we can say only that they all sounded just fine to us but, for the aforementioned reason, no great confidence can be placed in our judgment on this matter.

The concert closed in spectacular fashion with Respighi's spectacular orchestral tone poem The Pines of Rome complete with auxiliary brass choirs placed in several strategic locations around the great auditorium's balcony. Most impressive, both the work (which has one of classical music's most stirring closing movements) and the performance itself albeit, again, Maestro Nelsons's tempi were markedly on the draggy side.

All in all, an inaugural concert of which the BSO, Maestro Nelsons, and Boston need not be ashamed although it struck us as more than a little, um, curious that the inaugural concert of a symphony orchestra with its new music director on the podium should be programmed by that music director almost entirely with music of the opera and with opera stars as soloists.

Several years ago we made a New Year resolution that with each passing month since then, or so it seems, we find is becoming more and more difficult to live up to. This week we finally reached our breaking point and posted the following tweet to Twitter:

I challenge @alexrossmusic to defend (or at least explain) promoting this "music" by giving it notice.

The Twitter ID "@alexrossmusic" belongs to Alex Ross, one of the nation's most prominent and respected classical music critics, a best-selling author (The Rest Is Noise: Listening to the Twentieth Century), and the classical music critic for The New Yorker, one of the nation's most prominent and respected journals, and the "music" referred to is this; something only a Cagean or Stockhausean fundamentalist gone off the deep end would or could mistake for music. Mr. Ross's responding tweet — deleted by Mr. Ross almost as soon as it was posted and which tweet we didn't think to make a verbatim record of simply because we never imagined it would be necessary — was brazenly and uncharacteristically arrogant and self-important and made no attempt whatsoever to either acknowledge or answer our challenge.

As Mr. Ross is hardly the only classical music critic, print and/or digital, professional or amateur, guilty of promoting cacophonous noise (literally noise) masquerading as music under cover of being "performed" by legitimate musicians and being declared music by one or more classical music critics, one might imagine we're here picking on Mr. Ross for personal reasons but in so imagining one would be wrong. We singled out this particular instance because it's so off-the-chart egregious and because Alex Ross is Alex Ross who in his intensified zeal to promote new music (a perfectly honorable, necessary, and, especially for one in Mr. Ross's position, obligatory enterprise) since the publication of his above noted bestselling book has here done all classical music a grievous disservice. No matter how illustrious one's professional stature, one cannot hope to convince or persuade a potential audience for classical music, whether classical music of the new or canonical sort, by treating that potential audience as if it were made up of tone-deaf idiots who can be persuaded that actual noise is actually music simply on the say-so, explicit or implied, of an acknowledged expert.

It's time, long past time, that classical music critics of all statures within the profession embarked upon a searching, brutally frank, no-holds-barred reassessment of their professional selves and the effect of their work upon classical music audiences both existing and potential.

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (1) as of 2:01 AM Eastern on 21 May. See below.]

The always worthwhile reading philosopher of aesthetics Roger Scruton has some apposite observations published on the Future Symphony Institute website regarding so-called Konzept opera Regietheater. His essay brought some interesting attached comments as well among which is one by Yours Truly (a reply to another comment).

Worth your time reading, we think.

Update (2:01 AM Eastern on 21 May): We suppose we should include here the full text of our above noted comment reply just to make a record of it here on S&F. Text follows.

IAN wrote: "How dare something like politics, imperialism, contemporary audiences or that Butterfly is a child interfere with all the twirling parasols and cherry blossoms out the wazoo! And a great big cheery hello to that evergreen bete-noire of people who’d rather spend the day with a recording and posting outrage on Opera-L than darken the lobby of an actual opera house, the Bieito Ballo."

And speaking of politics, imperialism, contemporary audiences and bêtes noires...

The first thing one must understand about so-called Konzept opera stagings such as the Bieito _Ballo_ horror noted above (or pretty much any Bieito Konzept opera staging) is that they're NOT undertaken to make an opera "relevant to modern audiences" although that's the most common defense/justification in behalf of such stagings as IAN's above remarks demonstrate. The very idea is preposterous. Konzept opera stagings are almost always undertaken for a dual purpose: to energize the jaded operagoer and to give the Regie the opportunity to establish himself (or herself as the case may be) as a unique and separate creative entity (i.e., separate from the opera's original creator) never mind that it always involves the hijacking of the work of the opera's original creator. And there's also a more practical reason for undertaking a Konzept opera staging: it's a piece of cake, creatively speaking, as opposed to coming up with a new and resonant Werktreue opera staging fully faithful in sense and spirit to the opera creator's original intent as made manifest in the opera's score (music, text, and stage directions). Any hack can do the former. It takes a Regie of genuine and uncommon creative gift to accomplish the latter. Unhappily, as Regies go, the former are legion, the latter almost as rare as unicorns.

An extensive thread of posts concerning the cancellation of the Met's HD Live showings of the Met's production of John Adams's opera The Death of Klinghoffer developed on the venerable opera listserve Opera-L recently in which thread we offered our thinking not on that opera in particular but generally on operas grounded in real, historical events still alive in living memory. We reprint below what we wrote there simply to make it part of the S&F record.

I've never seen _Klinghoffer_ and was looking forward to the HD telecast of the opera just to discover what all the fuss was about. That now looks like an event unlikely to take place. There is, however, something I can say about such operas generally (i.e., operas grounded in real, historical events still alive in living memory which would include Adams's _Nixon_ and _Dr. Atomic_) which is that as intended works of art they're a really bad idea from the get-go. The reason for that is that it's all but impossible for a viewer to, at least subconsciously, NOT overlay and/or graft his thinking, biases, and prejudices concerning what was true or perceived as true about the historical case and its surrounding context onto the operas even though the operas themselves may not even so much as have touched on any particular point(s) in question. Once that happens, the work instantly degenerates into propaganda (agitprop) and so becomes, poetically and aesthetically, of little value or worth in its totality as an artwork. Such was true of _Nixon_ and _Dr. Atomic_ (the latter of which two operas has some sumptuous and genuinely beautiful music) both of which operas I did see.

Opera creators would do well to stay away — far away — from involving themselves in the creation of such operas — unless, of course, it's their intention to create such Brechtian-poisoned crap.

Here's another brilliant bit of opera commentary from the pen of the almost always on-target Heather Mac Donald. This about the jaded, perverted way of seeing Dvorák’s fairytale opera through the eyes of today's Brechtian-poisoned, postmodern "smart set" generally, and about the equally jaded and perverted critical response by two of New York's most Eurotrash-besotted mainstream media opera critics, James Jorden and Zachary Woolfe, to the Met's revival this past winter of the 1993 fairytale-magical and fairytale-lovely quasi-naturalistic production of the same work by director Otto Schenk and designer Günther Schneider-Siemssen.

We make no further comment preferring to let Ms. Mac Donald's piece speak for itself entirely as it says all that's pertinent.

[NOTE: This entry has been updated (2) as of 3:29 PM Eastern on 23 May. See below.]

Although there was relatively little comment on the matter to be found in the now largely moribund classical music blogosphere, the classical music niche of social media was afire with comment on the brutally frank criticism by five eminent Brit opera critics — the Financial Times's Andrew Clark ("a chubby bundle of puppy-fat"), the Independent's Michael Church ("a dumpy girl"), the Guardian's Andrew Clements ("stocky Octavian"), The Times's Richard Morrison ("unbelievable, unsightly and unappealing"), and The Telegraph's Rupert Christiansen ("dumpy") — of a badly physically miscast young singer (Tara Erraught) who plays the role of Octavian in the current Glyndebourne production of Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier which young singer according to these same five opera critics both sang and acted the role admirably, even superlatively, well.

And so what was the social media firestorm all about? Believe it or not, the impropriety and bad taste of these opera critics' daring to comment on the opera singer's physical appearance(!), if one can believe such imbecile complaint coming from an otherwise presumably intelligent and informed opera-going public as well as from a few opera professionals. In an open letter for publication on Norman Lebrecht's website Slipped Disc, mezzo-soprano Alice Coote wrote a scathing condemnation of the comments of these eminent opera critics from which open letter we quote the following extract:

We ALL need to talk. Arts administrators, Directors and Conductors, Audience members, Conservatoires, teachers, Families, Friends, Singers and Press and Critics and Opera Companies… EVERYONE. All of you who have known and love Opera...and still do. All of you who know it to be the Art form that is about celebrating the human voice, the human voice at its most Olympian heights of expression. [...] [Opera] is not about lights, it is not about costumes, it’s not about sets, it’s not even about sex or stature… It is ALL about the human voice. [...] All the visual messages that a production and costume brings to an opera does not alter ( even though they can try very hard) the fact that it’s true success in moving and making an audience love the Art form lies in the voice that sails across the pit to the audience and into their ears. ... [Opera] is about and really ONLY about communication through great singing. [...] OPERA is ALL about the voice. Many of those who think they know me and may be surprised by this. But it’s not an opinion, it’s a FACT [all caps for emphasis Ms. Coote's].

This sounds like a rant coming from a TOF (TOF: True Opera Fan — like a teenage movie fan only worse; much worse), not an opera professional.

So, opera is all about the voice, is it? Well, in certain limited cases we suppose that's true, and most particularly true of those operas belonging to the so-called bel canto opera era. They are indeed "all about the voice" by design as, after all, there's precious little else there all the rest being nothing more than platform and pretext for the showcasing of voices and singing. But Strauss's Der Rosenkavalier is no such opera. It's a genuine dramma per musica — a genuine music-drama — as are all Wagner's mature works and even several of his earlier operas (Der fliegende Holländer, Tannhäuser, and Lohengrin) as well as all Mozart's mature works (the so-called Da Ponte operas and even his Singspiel, Die Zauberflöte). None of these stageworks are "all about the voice". They're all about the (music-)drama the singers and singing being just one part of the performance apparatus which exist solely to serve the central (music-)drama. And since when has it been improper and in bad taste to comment on the physical appropriateness of the (singer-)actors in a fully staged presentation of a (music-)drama? Answer: never. It's all fair game for, and in fact a professional obligation of, the professional opera critic to make such comment and has been since Day One. The problem in this particular case was not a fault of the critics but of the inexperience of Ms. Erraught and the advice of her advisors (not to even speak of the production's director) who should have known better than to allow her to accept the role of Octavian in a fully staged version of this opera even though she is more than up to the role vocally and acting-wise.

Update (4:35 PM Eastern on 22 May): It's astonishing how thoroughly legitimate and appropriate if brutally frank criticism by five Brit (male) opera critics of a simple but egregious bit of physical miscasting has morphed into being considered by some as a "sexist" crime against women (a crime perpetrated by "The Old Guard – those white European males we love to hate...." as one (female) American opera critic characterized these five Brit opera critics). Incredible PC/feminist gibberish.

Here's the honest way to do operatic Konzept Regietheater while saving it harmless from being, ipso facto, unmitigated Eurotrash.

“Life is a bitter, painful fight” – the words, coming from the cavernous bass voice on the platform, reverberate round the tent until [director Graham] Vick interrupts to explain the emphases he wants. The temperature may be chilly but the mood is collaborative, and the atmosphere starts to heat up when another operatic bass starts to declaim simultaneously from an opposing platform. The scene also involves two stagehands, who hold placards emblazoned with the slogans “Homosexuality is a sickness” and “Our simple freedom is the right to carry a gun”. Vick, pointing to the first singer, interrupts again: "Don’t sing to him – sing to the world."

It is doubtful that the 19th-century Russian composer Modest Mussorgsky envisioned such a scenario when he wrote Khovanshchina, his epic tale of social and political conflict – but it encapsulates much of what Vick’s work is about. A long-time Russophile, he wants to draw parallels between the society portrayed by Mussorgsky, riven by political and ethno-religious strife, and the world we live in today. The opera, which Mussorgsky left incomplete, is being sung in English under a new title, Khovanskygate: A National Enquiry.

As if in response to the announced death of Joseph Kerman the notable classical music critic and scholar who in his brilliant and seminal 1956 book on opera (revised, 1988) Opera as Drama (in)famously and deathlessly dubbed Puccini's Tosca "a shabby little shocker", PBS re-aired the Met's Live in HD film of the opera this past Sunday night. It's been years since we last heard or saw this Italian soap opera and found ourself seized by a perverse desire to watch the telecast.

Notwithstanding the first-rate vocal excellence of the three principal singers (Patricia Racette as Floria Tosca, Roberto Alagna as Cavaradossi, and George Gagnidze as Scarpia), and despite the bland staging by Luc Bondy with its K-Mart furniture fittings, we confess we found the opera no more "a shabby little shocker" than a number of other Italian soap operas even as we deplored its totally unnecessary, filler-padded third act which padding was necessary to justify its setting off as an entire act rather than as the terminal scene of Act II and the entire opera which is what it should have been. Though Kerman was thoroughly contemptuous of Puccini as a composer of dramma per musica (a contempt we confess we share) we cannot help but feel he was being somewhat arbitrary in his designation of Tosca as a singular example of "a shabby little shocker" in the domain of Italian opera, for truth be told, it's no worse than other and better than most of its Italian opera brethren in that respect. We realize that's not much of an exoneration but, in all fairness, it's something we think ought to be noted.

Musicologist, author, critic, essayist, and emeritus professor of musicology at University of California, Berkeley Joseph Kerman is dead at 89 after a long illness reports the San Francisco Chronicle. Among his many notable papers and publications on music his slender but brilliant and seminal 1956 volume (revised, 1988) Opera as Drama, his first book which book (in)famously and deathlessly dubbed Puccini's Tosca "a shabby little shocker" and which book we first became acquainted with only in the early 2000s, reshaped the thinking of scholars, students, and serious fans of the artform everywhere concerning the structure and nature of opera and served us in particular for what turned out to be the book's incidental validation of our own less well formed and less than popular thoughts on the matter. Professor Kerman's critical voice will be sorely missed and we mourn his passing.

A carelessly written, less than insightful, but largely factually accurate old-news-regurgitating article in Slate by one Mark Vanhoenacker headlined "Requiem: Classical music in America is dead" complete with a lurid graphic by one Mark Stamaty has occasioned an outbreak of mass hysteria within the classical music community that has to be witnessed to be believed. Perhaps the most interesting thing about this outbreak is that every one of the hysterical responders to this article, including three professional classical music commentators who ought to have known better (Andy Doe, William Robin, and Anne Midgette), have responded, oblivious, not to the article itself which article, apart from an ill-chosen metaphor in a single sentence remarking on current trends in contemporary mainstream American culture as regards classical music ("Looking at the trend lines, it’s hard to hear anything other than a Requiem."), makes no claim or even so much as suggests that classical music is dead, but to the article's purposely sensationalist headline; a headline that almost certainly was not provided by the author of the article who typically has little control over such things but by the article's editor, a time-honored practice in the journalism biz.

So, what did the article actually have to say about classical music. Here are the article's lede (opening) grafs:

When it comes to classical music and American culture, the fat lady hasn’t just sung. Brünnhilde has packed her bags and moved to Boca Raton.

Classical music has been circling the drain for years, of course. There’s little doubt as to the causes: the fingernail grip of old music in a culture that venerates the new; new classical music that, in the words of Kingsley Amis, has about as much chance of public acceptance as pedophilia; formats like opera that are extraordinarily expensive to stage; and an audience that remains overwhelmingly old and white in an America that’s increasingly neither. Don’t forget the attacks on arts education, the Internet-driven democratization of cultural opinion, and the classical trappings—fancy clothes, incomprehensible program notes, an omerta-caliber code of audience silence — that never sit quite right in the homeland of popular culture.

Clearly, this is not claiming that classical music is dead in contemporary mainstream American culture but a suggestion that it finds itself in serious trouble; viz., as the rest of the article makes clear, relegated to the culture's deepest hinterlands, its outermost margins.

(Although the article negligently does not make note of it, this silent, insidious process had its beginnings in the mid-1960s and became more pressing with each passing year since and has today reached a degree that's perhaps the most extreme it's been since America became a fully developed nation sometime in the mid- to late-19th century.)

And following those lede grafs, that is what the balance of this article is all about; the thesis it attempts to support and prove using statistical evidence of the inarguable migration.

And that's it. No requiem, no funeral. The article's author even hopes classical music in American culture is due a comeback (see the article's closing graf).

The above commentary published here in an attempt to inject a modest measure of clear-eyed sanity into the presiding hysteria.

When we first heard that doctrinaire 12-tone composer Charles Wuorinen was at work on an opera(!) based on Brokeback Mountain, an essentially tragic short story by the brilliant writer Annie Proulx, our first thought was, "No way this is going to work." Everything about the vocabulary, grammar, and syntax of Wuorinen's relentlessly intellectual/cerebral musical language is thoroughly antipathetic to the lyrically dramatic musical requirements of opera. And when we further heard that Annie Proulx herself was to be the librettist — her first attempt at writing an opera libretto — we were all but certain the resulting work would be a hands-down catastrophe — that is, if it ever came into being at all. For it's almost axiomatic in opera that the greater the writer, the worse the opera librettist for as is true of all great opera librettists their words are made to serve as armature for the music whereas is true of all great writers their words are the music and Annie Proulx is a very great writer indeed.

Well, Brokeback Mountain the opera did come into being and just had its world premiere at the Teatro Real in Madrid and the first reviews have started coming in. A sampling:

⚫ Anthony Tommasini for The New York Times: Mr. Wuorinen has written an intricate, vibrantly orchestrated and often brilliant score that conveys the oppressiveness of the forces that defeat these two men, whose lives we follow over 20 years, starting in 1963 when they take a summer job herding sheep on Brokeback Mountain. But the same qualities in Mr. Wuorinen’s music that can captivate listeners — ingenious complexity, lucid textures, tartly atonal harmonic writing — too often weigh down the drama in this work. To his credit, there is not one saccharine or melodramatic touch in the score. Still, you yearn for the music to sing, to convey the moments of romantic bliss and sensual pleasure that the uptight Ennis Del Mar and his more daring companion Jack Twist experience. For long stretches, though, Mr. Wuorinen’s music comes across as a little too brainy and relentlessly busy.

⚫ Andrew Clements for The Guardian: [H]owever striking it is, Wuorinen's rather dry, often etiolated music, sometimes recalling late Schoenberg, sometimes serial Stravinsky, rarely transcends the text enough to enhance the drama rather than just adding rather terse punctuation and commentary to it. The tenebrous opening certainly signals the tragedy that is to come, but when it does, with Jack's death almost two hours later, there's nothing to deliver the gut wrench needed; Ennis's final monologue merely hints at the expressive world the music might have explored. [Wuorinen’s] generally sparse scoring at least means that a great deal of Proulx’s text gets across in the performance, but that’s a mixed blessing. There are far too many words: her original short story is a model of economy, but where most librettists pare down their sources, Proulx too often expands hers, adding explanations and back story, even whole scenes, that are not to be found in her original narration. Some subsidiary characters just aren’t needed, and though the opera is played straight through, in two acts of 11 scenes each without an interval, the pacing is uneven and the drama sometimes holds fire just when it needs to be moving remorselessly on.

⚫ Shirley Apthorp for The Financial Times: [T]here is nothing particularly provocative about Annie Proulx’s stark short story of two men sharing an impossible love in an inhospitable environment. It is very much the stuff of operas. Since Proulx wrote Wuorinen’s libretto herself, and the creative team stayed well away from the temptation of echoing Ang Lee’s film, the opera stands on its own. It is more explicitly tragic than the story. Ennis barely speaks at the beginning, but his part evolves as the work progresses, until finally, after Jack’s death, he can express his love in lyrical lines. Proulx’s text gives her characters words that were only implied in her original tale. Too many words; less would have been more. A superlative author is not automatically a consummate librettist.

Wuorinen’s score is as perilously close to sentimentality as it is possible for atonal music to be. Though he cites Moses und Aron as an inspiration, the music is unashamedly pictorial, echoing early Alban Berg more than late Schoenberg.